or the peaches of Persia, would not then be disappointed. So away from Los Angeles, with its groups of idle, brown-faced men, in their flap brimmed Mexican hats, leaning against the posts smoking thin cigars, and its groups of listless, dark-eyed women, with bright kerchiefs round their heads or necks, sitting on the doorsteps; away through valleys of corn, broken up by orangeries and vineyards, where the river flows through a tangle of willow and elder and muskeet; past the San Gabriel Mission, overtaken, poor idle old fragment of the past, by the railroad civilization of the present, and already isolated in its sleepiness and antiquity from the busier, younger world about it; on through a scene of perpetual fertility, orange groves and lemon, fields of vegetables and corn, with pomegranates all aglow with scarlet flowers, and eucalyptus-trees in their ragged foliage of blue and brown. The squash grows here to a monstrous size. "I have seen them, sir," said a passenger, "weighing as much as yourself." The impertinence of it! Think of a squash venturing to turn the scale against me. Perhaps it will pretend that it has as good a seat on a horse? Or will it play me a single-wicket match at cricket? I should not have minded so much if it had been a water-melon, "simlin," or some other refined variety of or even a the family. But that a squash, the 'poor relation' of the pumpkin, should--. But enough. Let us be generous, even to squashes. Some one ought to write the psychology of the squash. There is a very large human family of the same name and character. If you ask what the bulky, tasteless thing is good for, people always say, "Oh, for a pie!" Now that is the only form in which I have tasted it. And I can say, from personal experience, therefore, that it is not good for that. It never hurts anybody, or speaks ill of any one--an inoffensive, tedious, stupid person, too commonplace to be either liked or disliked. Economical parents say squashes are "very good for children," especially in pies. They may be. But they are not conducive to the formation of character.